If you notice, you'll find a lot of breeders who 'used to'.
I 'used to' have them too.
The trouble is the original WC gene pool was extremely small on this side of the pond and the geckos were in demand. That led to inbreeding just to get enough offspring to satisfy the market. Brothers and sisters, you name it, as long as some one had a pair, they were bred. In a few generations the eggs were duds, or didn't hatch, weak hatchlings and all the rest of it. A lot of people also didn't set them up properly so the geckos didn't survive. The European bloodlines are better, cleaner because they had more to start with.
To get good healthy viable fertile breedable and whatever else knobbies in North America, you really have to look. And make sure the breeder does have unrelated pairs, preferably with some European blood added to clean it all up.
I thoroughly enjoyed the knobbies, but they were too inbred to produce healthy offspring.
I wish you luck looking for some, it would be great to have them established in the hobby.
Some breeders do/did have knobbies that weren't inbred, but the vast majority of them are/were. If you search the archives of the GGA back in '99, there's a discussion with details of the inbreeding problems.
Hybrid Mode
